The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (23 page)

13.

The end of World War I did not bring peace. The cost of living doubled in five years, which led to thirty-six hundred strikes in the United States in 1919 alone. On May Day of that year, anarchists sent more than thirty green boxes disguised as department store toys to prominent men around the country, including Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, Postmaster General Burleson and Solicitor General William Lamar. Most of them were lucky. When the first few packages detonated in the hands of their recipients, sixteen bombs were still sitting in the General Post Office because they had insufficient postage.

The following month, ten bombs went off simultaneously in several cities, including San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York, and this time they weren’t mailed. In Washington, D.C., a man carrying a large suitcase apparently tripped on one of the steps leading to the attorney general’s front door, and the bomb exploded in his yard. A neighbor across the street, an ambitious assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin D. Roosevelt, strode through shards of glass in his living room, stepped over a body part thrown against his doorstep and ran to the attorney general’s house. Dozens of pink leaflets were fluttering down the street. “We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could.” The bombers promised to destroy all tyrannical institutions. “Never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins.”

The next day, the police found what was left of the bomber’s head on the roof of a three-story mansion a block away. They linked the bomber to an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani, who was tracked down and deported days after the June bombings. But that was just the beginning. Attorney General Palmer, who survived his second assassination attempt unscathed, amassed a federal crime-fighting force four times larger than that during the war. Officials estimated that New York City housed “more than twenty thousand persons of extreme radical views.” They were mostly foreigners, and the distinctions between anarchists and communists, Galleanists and Bolsheviks became meaningless. “On a certain day in the future, which we have been advised of,” Palmer warned Congress, “there will be another serious, and probably much larger, effort of the same character which the wild fellows of this movement describe as revolution, a proposition to rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”

The government responded to the bombings with “Red Raids” throughout the country. In the fall of 1919 and early 1920, authorities ransacked offices, confiscated files, destroyed property, roughed up presumed radicals, arrested more than ten thousand suspects and deported hundreds of foreigners in massive roundups. Emma Goldman and three hundred other radicals were deported on a ship under security so tight that no one, not even the U.S. Marines guarding the prisoners, knew the ship’s destination. The captain was instructed not to open his sailing orders until he was twenty-four hours at sea.

The biggest Red Raid started at exactly nine p.m. Eastern Time on January 2, 1920. Agents arrested more than three thousand people in thirty-five cities around the country—not just in likely enclaves along the eastern seaboard, but in places like Toledo, Des Moines, Louisville and Kansas City. In New York, more than one hundred Justice Department agents paired up with plainclothes policemen and fanned out across the city in army trucks and hired cars. When harsh interrogations didn’t yield the right answers, investigators manufactured confessions of violent antigovernment conspiracies and forged suspects’ signatures. Attorney General Palmer claimed to be acting under the authority of the Espionage Act—the U.S. Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, which meant that the country was still technically at war.

The Red Raids fed information to an obscure new wing of the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) called the General Intelligence Division. Wherever its agents went, they confiscated files, books, newspapers and magazines connecting radicals across the country in a community of words (the Communist Party alone had twenty-five newspapers). Bookshops were hubs of subversive activity. It was a sign of the times that a former YWCA on Fifteenth Street in New York was now a shop selling radical literature. The government located underground print shops and leafed through publications sent through the mail to piece together the network of publishers, writers, bookstores, comrades and sympathizers.

The
Little Review
was one of the magazines caught up in the dragnet, which jeopardized the only platform for James Joyce’s growing opus. The Post Office banned the January 1920 issue because barroom Dubliners in the
Ulysses
installment refer to Queen Victoria as “the flatulent old bitch that’s dead” and a “sausageeating” German on top of it. They joke about the potential medical consequences of her son King Edward VII riding more women than horses: “There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo.” The references were disparaging enough to be illegal if a federal official wanted them to be. Years after its support for Emma Goldman and anarchism,
The
Little Review
was still under scrutiny.

By 1921, the General Intelligence Division had files on nearly half a million subversives, and that was just a start. Ezra Pound would have a file. So would Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck. So would James Joyce. The files were methodically cataloged and cross-referenced by the division’s ambitious young director, J. Edgar Hoover. He had received his appointment on the eve of the Red Raids, when he was twenty-four years old, and he got his start as a government librarian.

But radicalism was not rooted out easily. On September 16, 1920, a skinny, unshaven man in workman’s clothes drove an open wagon through downtown Manhattan. He stopped across the street from the J.P. Morgan building on Wall Street, close to the New York Stock Exchange, set a time bomb wired to a hundred pounds of dynamite and disappeared back into the city. The blast shook Wall Street’s financial buildings to their foundations and threw people to the ground before they even heard the explosion. Glass from buildings as far as Broadway fell down on the heads of bankers and clerks like jagged snow. The bomb was packed with five hundred pounds of iron slugs the size of walnuts. Whoever made the bomb broke apart cast-iron window weights with a sledgehammer so that the pieces would gouge into granite buildings and skulls. Hundreds of wounded survivors staggered for safety amid flames, overturned cars and mutilated bodies. Thirty-eight people died, and pieces of a horse lay all along Wall Street.

John Quinn was in his Nassau Street office when the bomb shook the building. He saw a cloud of greenish yellow smoke rising above the roof of the Assay building a couple of blocks away as well as the shattered glass dome on top of the Morgan building. Seconds later, crowds surged up the street, and Quinn watched the people down below pushing one another forward and toppling like tall grass in the wind.

The financial center attack was payback for the government raids. The devastation, Quinn wrote to the artist Jacob Epstein, was “a horrible price to pay on account of anarchists, mostly Russian anarchists, and nearly all Russian Jews, I am sorry to say.” Quinn felt trapped on an island teeming with the world’s unwanted biology, and he ranted to Ezra Pound about what New York had become in the last decade. The city was bursting with “seven or eight hundred thousand dagos, a couple of hundred thousand Slovaks, fifty or sixty thousand Croats and seven or eight hundred thousand sweating, pissing Germans.” It was a city of infernal noise and voracious, mongrel crowds. The Jews swarming into New York from all over Eastern Europe, he wrote to Pound, are “nothing but walking appetites.”

—

THE RADICALS THREATENING New York were also, more often than not, the city’s sexual iconoclasts. They attacked marriage, fought for birth control, examined, explored and celebrated sexualities. Anarchists, communists and sexual liberators shared neighborhoods, ideas, readers and publishers. Ben Huebsch published D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce alongside unabashedly communist books like
The Truth About Socialism
.
Mother Earth
and
The
Masses
advocated tirelessly for greater sexual freedom. In March 1916, the month before the United States entered the war,
The
Masses
published an editorial defending Germany. “Militarism is not a trait of any race or nation,” it said. “Do not let them make you hate Germany. Hate militarism.”

Next to the editorial was an attack on John Sumner, Anthony Comstock’s newly appointed successor at the NYSSV, protesting the fact that Sumner could censor whatever he wanted, including any issue of
The Masses
he didn’t like. The magazine declared him “the supreme power in American publishing life.” Five months later, Sumner arrested the magazine’s circulation manager. He confiscated all copies of the September issue of
The Masses
as well as copies of Dr. Auguste Forel’s five-hundred-page medical treatise,
The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes
. The Swiss doctor’s prose was not exactly racy (“Copulation, or coitus, takes place as follows . . . ”), but Sumner was settling scores.

Sumner was an unassuming man in spectacles, a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who was married and the president of the men’s club of his Long Island Episcopal church three years running. His demeanor was not calm, exactly, so much as relentlessly procedural. Sumner had the look of a bureaucrat who arrived early for work and ate his lunch at his desk.

He took over Comstock’s work at the beginning of literary obscenity’s golden age. Novelists, activists, doctors and scholars were beginning to address sexual matters more frankly, and the U.S. censorship regime was tested as never before. At the end of the nineteenth century, burning books had hardly been necessary. Comstock’s power drew from a combination of legal threats and moral suasion to cow publishers who were already more or less compliant. Even if blueblood publishers like Putnam and Houghton were willing to risk their sterling reputations to publish provocative novels, fighting the Society’s standards meant risking an expensive legal battle to sell a book whose profit margins were likely to be razor thin no matter what. The economics left morally questionable books to fly-by-night operations with underground handpresses that would pirate books published in Paris. While they would remain a problem, they would be marginal.

All of that was changing. Cheaper books and higher literacy rates meant that the nation’s readers were younger, poorer, more urban and more diverse, and they demanded stories that resembled the world around them. It was only a matter of time before books began to change. In the 1910s and 1920s, a spate of new novels appeared that would have been unthinkable a decade before.
Hagar Revelly
,
The “Genius,” Jurgen, The Story of a Lover, The Well of Loneliness
,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

Ulysses
was the most spectacular example of a scandalous book gaining praise in respectable circles, and though some of those books were illegal, daring authors could rely upon a new generation of publishers who were willing to risk prosecution and fight charges in court in order to serve the country’s urban readers. Ben Huebsch, Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, Max Schuster and Bennett Cerf. The list itself was a sign of the changing industry. One of the old book dealers privately complained, “They’re all goddamn Jews!”

Sumner knew the ground was shifting beneath the NYSSV, and he exploited the Red Scare to regain control. He began talking about obscenity not as the work of the devil but as the work of anarchists, Bolsheviks, radical feminists and family planners clustering in urban immigrant enclaves. “Just as we have the parlor Anarchist and the parlor Bolshevist in political life,” Sumner declared during the Red Raids, “so we have the parlor Bolshevist in literary and art circles, and they are just as great a menace.”

There was little difference between the dangerous words that the government found treasonable and the salacious words that the NYSSV found morally corrupt. The vice society, in other words, was strengthening national security, and as the Bureau of Investigation’s work mounted, so did the Society’s. In the thick of the Red Raids, Sumner and his men raided radical bookshops for sexual material—according to the society, the Yiddish translation of Forel’s
The Sexual Question
was now an anarchist book. In 1912 the NYSSV arrested seventy-six people across the country. In 1920 it arrested 184, more than any in the vice society’s history. Sumner noted that less than a third of the criminals were of “real American stock.” As the Society’s records made clear, most were German and Irish.

Sumner worried that foreign ideas about sex were infiltrating the legal system. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seemed poised to become law in 1920, guaranteeing women the right to vote, Sumner warned that “radical feminists” wanted to establish separate, antagonistic powers. They wanted the government to legitimize children born out of wedlock, which would encourage pregnant women to remain unmarried and give birth to “promiscuous children”—the nation’s home life would crumble. At the moment, such women were marginal, he said, “but they are shrewd, and one finds them writing insidious and widely read books on the freedom of the modern woman, and advocating still greater sex freedom.” As if they didn’t already have enough.

—

JOHN SUMNER SEARCHED for opportunities to combine the fight against radicals and sex liberators, and he soon had his chance. One day in the summer of 1920, the New York district attorney telephoned Sumner to discuss a disturbing issue of
The
Little Review
. In the latest installment of
Ulysses
, Gerty MacDowell is sitting on a rock on the beach while a choir sings in a nearby church. Her friends Edy and Cissy are watching Cissy’s twin brothers, Tommy and Jacky, play along the shore in their sailor suits, and Gerty watches herself being watched by a man farther up the beach, Leopold Bloom. As fireworks go off in the distance, Gerty leans back and Bloom catches a glimpse of her blue garters.